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fulness made in them. That change is accurately spoken of as a fall of the race in capacity as well as position. The first pair's original capacity for knowing and enjoying God we can infer from their place before Him. They were as His children, made in His own likeness. He evidently held intercourse with them in a manner so appreciable by their powers of perception and familiarly sensible to them that they recognised His approach at once; and his visiting them in that manner is referred to in Genesis as a thing of ordinary occurrence would be. After their sin, as if the power of appreciating His nature and valuing His pleasure had gone from them in the first act of separative disobedience, they at once felt towards Him as a God afar off from them, and hid themselves from His approach. In terrible contrast to the near family communion of the garden eastward in Eden, He seems to have had, as it were, to begin to reveal Himself to the expelled race as if He had been unknown to them; and what is most instructive as to their having fallen in spiritual capabilities, He began to teach them divine knowledge slowly from its very rudiments. The chronological progress of revelation is strikingly a progress in slowly unveiling the invisible God, “line upon line, here a little, and there a little;" from the fundamental truths of His almighty power and Godhead gradually describing to mankind, and opening their eyes to recognise His holy love of them. Even to Adam, God had to renew the feeling that His will must be supreme and all-powerful over His childcreature. God's perfect son, so degraded in his own eyes in the very hour of his sin as to hide himself, had at the same time. fallen so in intellect and conscience as to think he could say to Him, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat;" and to need a new revelation of his position towards his Father and Creator made to him in the terrible form of fallen man's first lesson in the holiness of God, "Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and eaten of the tree of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it; dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." To Adam's first-born child, the first son of the fallen likeness, God had to teach even His omniscience. Cain

had no feeling of the truth that God is everywhere, beholding all things, and thought he could conceal his brother's murder even from Him. These two examples illustrate how suddenly come to and great were the ignorance and the blindness of understanding and feeling into which human nature had fallen by its sinning against God, and from how rudimentary a point the education of the race to right habitual thoughts and feelings towards Him had to be begun.

Antediluvian Faith.

3. During the first strongly marked period of sinful man's God the Avenger. history, extending from the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden to the destruction of the corrupted human world by the Flood, the chief knowledge that mankind had always before their eyes of God's moral position towards them was His condemnation of sin. That was the great truth published by the prominent facts of antediluvian history; the expulsion and bitter degradation and death of Adam and Eve, the fugitive life of Cain, the universal burden of labour and sorrow, and in the end the hundred years of threatening of a flood. There is one record left of the thoughts which that world of men had concerning God, in Lamech's address to his two wives when he had slain a man. His ruling thought of God was evidently as of the judge and avenger. Jude tells us that that was the special subject of Enoch's preaching (Jude 14, 15). That rudimentary thought of fallen mankind's faith received impressiveness from the feeling of God's almighty power and Godhead, which, as Paul notices (Rom. i. 20), the race continued capable of from the beginning. It is instructive to observe that this is the feeling that still animates the indefinite dread of retribution for crime which all but makes up the professed faiths of heathenism; and that this rudimentary religion is with the frequency of a rule betrayed as an unprofessed superstition, hanging like a millstone about the necks of professed infidels.

4. That the divine abhorrence was of sin, and not of mankind Hopes of themselves, cropped out here and there during that long

mercy.

God drawing nigh.

rudimentary lesson, lasting for 1600 years. That truth ap-
peared in God's partial protection of Cain; in His communion
with Enoch, and taking him away without death; and in the
preaching of Enoch and Noah, both probably, since Noah
certainly was, messengers of merciful desires on God's part to
men if they would understand and believe and repent. These
facts indicated the presence of love in some form along with
holy anger. The promise that the seed of the woman should
bruise the serpent's head, having been given in immediate
connection with the condemnation of the woman and her
serpent tempter, must have been understood by the first
sinners, with all its indistinctness, as a promise of a merciful
kind; something set against and alleviating the condemnation
of death which had just been passed upon man. Eve's ex-
clamation on the birth of her first son shows that she regarded
him as a gift, not of anger, but of goodness. And doubtless
the promise joined to "her seed" would be handed down, a
traditional invitation to trust in the Lord God's having merci-
ful purposes towards His human creatures. That the ante-
diluvian patriarchs were able to think of God with some
thought of His being willing to receive them, is significantly
indicated by the names which some of them gave to their
children. Enoch, according to Dr Kitto, means " dedicated;"
Mahaleel, a Sethite name, is "praise of God;" Methusael, a
Cainite one,
a man of God." The fact that the holy name
appears in more of the Cainite than of the Sethite names, and
that those now quoted indicative of feelings able to turn to
God with other thoughts than those of fear, are found among
the descendants of Cain as well as in the race of Adam's
better son, is one that breaks the deepest darkness of that
dispensation of fear with some streaks of light.

Hebrew Faith.

5. God's manner with mankind after the Flood shows a great unveiling of His purposes of grace to the penitent. It would perhaps be proximately accurate to say that in the old world He suffered man to draw near to Him, and in the new

begun world, which was separated so essentially from the old, in that it was the descendants of one selected and only preserved family of the old, He drew near to them. His selection of Noah to begin a new population of the earth, was the type or first example of His manner of dealing with mankind during the next great period of sinful man's history, that which continued until the fulness of time. That was a policy of selection-selection for one constant purpose of training mankind by example to appreciation of God's moral nature, and faith in His disposition of kindness towards them. The religious history of the whole period was shortly this, that God brought up a nation to be the instructor of the world, and placed it and moved it about among the nations of the world so as to be an effective light to them, making known His moral nature and His dispositions towards man. The fortunes of the chosen people, which were constantly declared to be visitations for their fidelity to or sins against their holy Jehovah, manifested historically the nature of Jehovah to the peoples among whom their triumphs or captivities brought them; and the exposition of the religious meaning of the history was completed by the revealed religious knowledge and worship of the Hebrew people being brought systematically under the impressed observation of those nations. The same system of examples and active guides in faith-i.e., in true habitual thoughts of God-we see in narrower circles in the Hebrew history. Abraham, the great example of faith, is an instance before the development of the teacher-nation, and David in the period of its greatness. The examples of faith recorded in Heb. xi. were all lights in contemporary circles of society, as well as to succeeding readers of their story.

and appre

6. To these examples, both the nation and the individuals, of Progress of how He wished mankind to know and enjoy Him, God drew revelation nearer than He had done to former generations, and nearer as ciation. time went on; and the progress is observable as one in faith as well as revelation-the nearness recognised as well as declared. He who in the old world was practically known only " afar off" by His creating power, or His general government of man in the interests of holiness as the avenger of crime, became, in

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the new, associated with persons and places. He was Jehovah and Jehovah-Jireh, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and of Jacob. At the beginning of Israel's nationality, the drawing near of God to mankind was marked thus clearly. It was the beginning of a most distinct and advancing unveiling of His nature and His affections towards men. He speaks at that time of making Himself practically "known " to the Egyptians and the Hebrews-" known" evidently in a nearer position, and more closely compelling recognition, than they had thought of before. To the Hebrews the message was, "I will be to you a God, and ye shall know that I am Jehovah your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians' (Ex. vi. 7). Of the Egyptians he says, "And the Egyptians shall know that I am Jehovah, when I have stretched forth my hand upon Egypt to bring out the children of Israel from amongst them" (Ex. vii. 5). The progress of revelation had to begin with a rudimentary lesson to the Hebrews in Egypt, sunk for generations in Egyptian bondage, and succumbing to its idolatries. Jehovah had to them, as to mankind after the Fall, to reveal Himself somewhat from the beginning as the "I AM”—the Sole Existence-the Eternal-the Only Living —before whom the gods of Egypt were nothing; and also to recall to their thoughts the primitive religious knowledge of their race, that He was the God of their fathers, Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob. A promise of much advanced faith accompanied that new revelation made through Moses (Ex. vi. 3). It was that they should know Him as even Abraham had not known Him; that He would take them to be to Him for a people, and be to them a God. And the progress of that special relationship to become religiously "known," recognised as well as revealed, was rapid as the Hebrew separation advanced. He became thought of by them as their deliverer, with a mighty hand and a stretched-out arm, from Egypt. He was speedily known to the nations to whom they came in their consolidating life of the wilderness, as the "Jehovah of their hosts," the God of their battles. The characteristic revelation belonging to Hebrew historical faith was His commanding a dwelling-place to be made for Him in the midst of

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